


We are the ashes of a fire that never burnt

by Cuits



Category: Sports Night
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:54:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inmediately after Quo Vadimos.</p><p>There are relationship that were never meant to be, others instead, have always been unavoidable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We are the ashes of a fire that never burnt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DanaCasey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanaCasey/gifts).



**DAN**

 

"And we are out!"

 

Kim announces the end of the emission like she has done so many times before, although this time it’s completely different. Someone runs to go buy cheap champagne and Dana manages to set every conceivable speaker to blast "We are the champions".

 

There is a contagious euphoric joy unwrapping itself around the studio and Dan just leans back in his anchor chair and sighs deeply.

 

"There is going to be so much sorrow," he says and Casey looks at him amused, and leans back in his own chair mirroring him.

 

"Sorrow?"

 

"And despair," says Dan completely serious.

 

"There is going to be so much sorrow and despair?"

 

Dan nods solemnly and then allows himself to smile a little. "Among the Laker Girls," he explains, "now that we are not going to L.A."

 

"Technically I was never going to go to L.A.," Casey reminds him.

 

"Then technically all the sorrow and despair is due to losing me."

 

"Sure."

 

Someone manages to produce not only cheap alcohol but what seems to be some passable, fake cuban cigars, and not for the first time Dan wonders if there is someone in the control room who knows how to do magic. Or witchcraft. Probably Natalie.

 

The studio is now full of people celebrating, dancing, even kissing and Dan sighs with the content satisfaction of someone who watches a bunch of kids having fun. At his side, Casey has found a bottle of champagne without having to actually get up of his chair and is drinking directly from it. He is, as a matter of fact, drinking at quite a pace and Dan starts to suspect when he passes the bottle along almost empty to blatantly gaze towards the far end of the studio.

 

“Casey?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Dan follows his gaze till he finds Dana, smiling and laughing and dancing barefoot with a bottle of champagne half empty in her hands.

 

“You were totally and completely over Dana, right?”

 

“Yep, totally and completely,” he assures him but his gaze doesn’t falter.

 

“Okay.”

 

“I am going to kiss her,” Casey announces and Dan really has to make a superhuman effort not to simply start hitting his head with the desk. Repeatedly.

 

“You are going to kiss Dana.”

 

“In a _I’m-totally-and-completely-over-her way_ ,” he says and gets up with the demeanor of men who have found a purpose in life. Great.

 

“Sure.”

 

Dan gets up himself and intercepts a false cuban cigar. For as much and for as long as he has loved Casey and Dana, he has never been able to understand them; this constant drama they choose to bring into their lives is absurd and distressful. Like choosing to have lice, he supposes.

 

Natalie appears at his side, bottle in one hand, leaning on his shoulder with the other.

 

“Dany-boy!”

 

“I’m leaving the Laker Grils for you, guys. You better be good to me from now on.”

 

She looks at him in the eye, her face awfully close to his, so close that he can smell the champagne in her breathing as she contemplates him with a serious, straight face that it is quite uncharacteristic of her.

 

“When, Danny-boy haven’t I been anything but good to you?”

 

“There was the no-pants incident.”

 

“Nonsense,” she says and smiles wide and bright. “You should call Rebecca and tell her to come celebrate with us.”

 

He puts the unlighted cigar in his mouth and his hands in the front pockets of his trousers. He would swing a little forwards and backwards in feigned naivety and ignorance if he thought he could get away with it.

 

“Rebecca?”

 

“Yeah. You know, blonde, pretty, causes you to get hit by ladders… Rebeca.”

 

Dan sighs, an honest-to-God sigh. “I’m not going to call Rebecca.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because I was moving to L.A even though I’m not moving to L.A. anymore but I didn’t know that back then, so I threw her phone number away,” he explains but Natalie keeps looking at him and he just seem unable to stop justifying himself, “Besides, she left me once to get back with her bastard of an ex-husband and I don’t need that kind of drama—I don’t like that kind of drama so I... yes, I definitely threw her phone number away.”

 

People drink, dance and shout around them and there is a moment as Frank Sinatra’s “My way” sounds loudly in the studio when Dan thinks he is going to really get away with it. He has ripped the band-aid off and everything is going to be okay now and Natalie totally understands it.

 

“Are you stupid?”

 

That moment is quickly gone.

 

“Am I—”

 

“It was a rhetorical question, you dummy,” she interrupts. “That woman came to you to apologize because she recognizes she made a mistake and that doesn’t make her dramatic, that makes her human.”

 

“Yes but—”

 

“How long is going to last this conversation before you realize that I am right and you are wrong? Because, you know, there is a party going on.”

 

He has the arrogance to snort and everything before he looks around and sees Casey and Dana dancing, and has the kind of revelation that people build cults around: he has become The-Dating-Plan Dana. He has rejected someone he likes because she didn’t came to him at the right time or in the right way.

 

He can feel the blood draining completely from his face.

 

“Oh God.”

 

“There you go,” says Natalie with blatant satisfaction.

 

He grabs her by the shoulders to force her already drifting attention back to him. “Don’t judge, you are my friend, you are on my side. I need you to help me look in the trash.”

 

Natalie puts her own hands over his shoulders, the bottle she holds hanging awkwardly over his arm. “I don’t judge, I’m your friend, but I’m on Rebecca’s side and I need more alcohol to help you with that.”

 

**CASEY**

 

Dana is effulgent.

 

Not only right now as she dances barefoot, happy and careless; she has always been that way for as long as Casey has known her.

 

Effulgent.

 

She has been his beacon since they were in college, the place to look at when he was surrounded by darkness and needed some radiant light. He has, somehow managed to ignore that fact from time to time, to consign it to oblivion as everything that was a source of conflict with Lisa.

 

Dan would surely say that he was being melodramatic.

 

Whatever.

 

He lost his jacket and shoes somehow half an hour ago, the three top buttons of his shirt are unbuttoned, and his tie loose hanging from his neck as he dances to tunes that mysteriously keep coming out of the studio sound system.

 

"Come with me," he says grabbing Dana's hand.

 

She doesn't object, she doesn't even look surprised. "Okay," she says and goes along with him.

 

The hallways and the open area where the administrative pool is located are barely illuminated, the sound of the music just a murmur as they pass what seems to be more than one unnamed couple making out. Casey guides her toward his office; he has designed a very intelligent and seamless plan in the last hour. It goes like this:

 

1.- Kiss Dana.

 

2.- Somehow manage to keep kissing her in the future.

 

Seamless.

 

He is so focused on this plan of his, he doesn't even notice that the lights of the green room are on until they are both at its open door to find Dan, Natalie and Jeremy on the floor. "Do I wanna know what’s going on?" inquires Dana at his side, still holding his hand.

 

Dan sighs loudly as Natalie shoves Jeremy lightly on the ribs.

 

"We don't judge, we are Dan's friends even though we are totally on Rebecca's side," he parrots emotionless.

 

"That's right," says Natalie satisfied.

 

"I'll take that as a no," concedes Dana and Casey has absolutely no idea of what is going on but he has no intention to stay to find out. He'll ask Dan later. Tomorrow.

 

"Okay so, we are going to leave you to... whichever it is that you are doing then."

 

He leads the way once more, Dana laughing at his heels until he finds an empty, dark office. He gets in and pulls her to him to close the door behind them. He doesn’t bother to switch the light on.

 

“I am going to kiss you now,” he announces because he believes in explicit consent and not so much in what the romantic comedies neither of them watch have to say about improvised kisses.

 

“Oh, okay,” she sounds less confident than her usual self, like she isn’t sure what his intentions are, like she doesn’t know what to expect from a declaration like that.

 

The room is dark but there is some clarity coming through the windows and Casey can make her features out perfectly. She has always been her own source of light.

 

Casey puts his hands on her jaw and caresses her cheeks with his thumbs and he can feel the tension radiating from her. He kisses her then, presses lightly his lips upon hers, warm and soft until Dana sighs and the tension dissipates from her.

 

She breaks the chaste kiss and begins to talk, her words practically vibrating over his lips. “Well, that was—”

 

He doesn’t let her finish and puts his lips on hers again, lightly, asking silently for permission until she opens her mouth enough for Casey to deepen the kiss. The idea that she could think that that chaste first kiss is what he had in mind is so preposterous that he can’t help smiling just the tiniest bit.

 

His right hand goes for her hip and he walks her backwards until he has her pinned against the wall, his tongue claiming as much of her mouth as it can, his teeth softly biting her lower lip.

She moans from the back of her throat and the sound creates an abyss at the bottom of his stomach.

 

 _Effulgent_ , he thinks, and for the life of him he can't figure out how there were times when he didn't see this.

 

**DANA**

 

She wakes in the middle of the afternoon with the kind of headache that only the consumption of enough alcohol and not enough water can induce.

 

She groans out loud and the sound makes her groan some more although silently this time. Dana checks her watch. She doesn’t roll her eyes because she is afraid she’d pass out from the effort, and wishes she could just crawl back under the sheets and sleep some more but she can’t because she has a program to produce.

 

She actually has a program to produce.

 

She smiles and probably even giggles a little, though she is not going to admit that to anyone. And then she keeps on remembering that after the good news came the party, and that the party came with alcohol, and that after the alcohol came Casey.

 

Her smiles completely freezes as the sound of blood pumping in her veins fills in her ears and makes the noise in her head almost unbearable.

 

She skips breakfast, lunch, whichever, and heads straight for the shower and remains under the spray until the hot water runs out and the bathroom resembles a Turkish bath. She dresses, crosses town, grabs much needed coffee and doesn't dare to take her sunglasses off until she is seated at her desk in her not very well-lit office, and in all that time all her brain manages to think is,“ _oh no, oh God no_ ”.

 

This present situation resembles too much of her college years; after-party hangover and the hazy memory of having made out with Casey. Someday, somehow, she will have to start learning _something_.

 

There is a soft knock on her door and the next thing she knows is that Casey is sitting in front of her, all long limbs tiredly spilled on the visitor's chair and aviator sunglasses covering half his face.

 

“Hey,” he says and Dana barely groans and rests her head on her hands.

 

“So…” he adds after a couple of heartbeats, but he doesn’t seem to have anything more to say.

 

God. She should have slept like two hundred hours before she had to deal with this.

 

“So?” she tries to encourage words other than monosyllables out of him.

 

“Yep.”

 

She straightens her head and rolls her eyes.

 

“Casey?”

 

“Uhm?”

 

“Use your words,” she says, her patience already running thin. “Or you know, don’t use them at all and let me die the slow death of the extremely hungover.”

 

Casey smiles for like half a second before sighing with his sunglasses still on and his stupid posture like he has just fallen from the sky and onto her chair.

 

“Listen, about last night—”

 

“We’ve done this enough times to know the drill,” she interrupts, because they’ve had this very conversation so many times before that she doesn’t actually need Casey’s intervention to finish it. “We were drunk, we weren’t really thinking, we don’t want to deal with the consequences… let’s cut the awkward phase short this time. Please.”

 

“I think we should have sex. You and me. Together. With each other.”

 

There are a couple of seconds in which Dana’s heart forgets to keep it cool and her stomach kind of clenches before she reminds her stupid subconscious that even though she can’t read his expression behind the stupid sunglasses she knows he is not talking seriously.

 

“You know, Casey, that joke wasn’t funny the other night at Anthony’s and it keeps not being funny now.”

 

Very slowly, Casey gets up and walks in the direction of the door. Dana is starting to feel like she should get some of those free days she never gets to use and go somewhere nice and exotic and absolutely hangover-free.

 

Suddenly Casey stops short on his tracks a mere step away from the door and goes back to claim the visitor’s chair as his personal resting throne or something.

 

“Casey?”

 

“We’ve been here before.”

 

“Yes, it was literally seconds ago.”

 

She is still bothered by the fact that she can’t read him behind the glasses and the threat of a throbbing headache forming at the back of her skull.

 

“I wasn’t really joking the other night at Anthony’s. Or seconds ago for that matter.”

 

“You said it was a joke.”

 

“No, I didn’t.”

 

“You laughed at it!”

 

“Which is what people do when they are being rejected and want to cover it!”

 

“I didn’t say anything!”

 

“Exactly!”

 

She lifts her hands and rubs her temples, massaging them gently and tries very, very hard not to freak out.

 

“I don’t—”

 

“We should sleep together, get rid of the unresolved sexual tension and move on,” he says with the conviction of someone who has previously thought about it in a serious, actually-this-can-happen kind of way.

 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

 

“We should sleep together.”

 

Where is her coffee? She needs more coffee. There is a part of her who can’t believe what she is hearing and right now, that part of her is feeling a little offended too, to be honest.

 

“I distinctly remember you telling me you had already moved on.”

 

“I might have been slightly exaggerating.”

 

Okay, so maybe she is not only too hungover for this conversation but also paradoxically completely too sober for it. Fan-fucking-tastic.

 

**DAN**

 

It takes him a lot of time and a considerable amount of adhesive tape to restore the piece of paper with Rebecca's number in an order that seems logically plausible. It also takes him a lot of time and a considerable amount of coffee to almost completely interpret Rebecca’s handwriting and translate it into actual numbers that an occidental, educated human being could recognize.

 

“Do you think that’s a four or a nine?” he asks Casey offering him the piece of paper almost covered by adhesive tape. Casey peeks at it from behind his sunglasses, flinches and tries to read it with such an effort that is almost audible to Dan.

 

“Are these even _numbers_?” he puts his sunglasses back in place and groans as he leans back in his office chair. Not for the first time Dan is really glad he doesn’t really drink alcohol.

 

“Give me that back.” He is the tiniest bit bothered by his friend’s lack of decoding skills. “I’m going to call both and hope for the best.”

 

“Who are you calling?”

 

“Rebecca and apparently a completely stranger.” He sighs and looks at the paper some more. His hands are not trembling. At all. “It seems like I’m a little bit into drama after all.”

 

“Of course you are,” says Casey matter-of-factly. “You like sports! You know what’s sports without drama?”

 

“Soccer?”

 

“Soccer.”

 

They are in their respective chairs and what he has recently discovered is his—and only his—designated office but something is completely off. Aside of his Rebecca induced distracted mood and the obvious post-too-much-celebration mood that runs in the studio, Casey has been sitting and looking at a blank wall for the better part of an hour which is, per se, worryingly un-Casey like.

 

“What’s up with you, anyway?”

 

“Have you failed to notice everybody walking in with sunglasses?” Casey doesn’t shift, doesn’t change the undetermined point of his unfocused attention.

 

“Yeah, you all look like a pitiable version of a gangster gang loosely inspired on the Blues Brothers,” he says more amused than condescending. “I meant, what’s up with you other than the obvious hangover.”

 

“I’m thinking.”

 

“Is that something unusual?”

 

“I’m contemplating.”

 

“Do you need any more synonyms? Should I bring the thesaurus?”

 

Casey sighs like he just has to put up with so, so much and turns in his chair to look at Dan instead of at the damn, white wall. “I just told Dana that I want to have sex with her in order to move on.”

 

“You want to have sex with Dana in order to do something you supposedly did like half a year ago?” he ask incredulously.

 

“No, that’s what she thinks I want.”

 

“Because that’s what you told her.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But is not what you really want to do.”

 

“No.” Casey smiles sideways and he elevates both eyebrows briefly in what dan knows is the Casey equivalent of _eureka_. “I’m going to trick her into keep having more sex with me. It’s a seamless plan.”

 

Dan has the distinctly feeling he should have taken the California offer. It had the implicit promise of less need to hit his head on the desk and more cheerleaders.

 

“You know who trick girls into sex? Sex offenders.”

 

“I’m not a sex offender.”

 

“That’s also what sex offenders say.”

 

“I am not a sex offender!”

 

“I’m just saying if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck—”

 

Casey is up with a movement executed so fast that it looks almost acrobatic and Dan keeps wondering how on Earth he was able to end up married in the first place. It probably had something to do with his ex-wife being a soul-sucking, manipulative, fame-hungry, replicate of a human being.

 

“I’m going to talk to Dana again.”

 

He snorts as Casey leaves the room with resolute urgency and plays a little with the piece of paper still in his hands. He has a decision to make: nine or four?

 

He picks up the phone and dials the combination of numbers he thinks are written on the restored paper and waits for someone to answer the phone.

 

“Dan?” The voice of Rebecca sounds light and hopeful and for a second too long he doesn’t really know how to speak anymore.

 

“How did you know it was me?”

 

“I didn’t give this number to anyone else yet.”

 

“Right.” Dan smiles, so wide it almost hurts and he doesn’t even know why he is smiling like that. “I was wondering if you’d like to have a beer with me tonight after the show.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Great. I’ll see you later then.”

 

It has been easy and light but still his heart seems to have taken it like a sprint for the goal, beating fast and strong.

 

“Dan?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Do I need to keep carrying the divorce papers in my bag?”

 

He unflatteringly snorts into the receiver, “Ask me again on the next date.”

 

Some would say it is destiny. It is, in fact, a nine.

 

**CASEY**

 

He painfully discards the sunglasses and opens the door of her office with the kind of gravitas granted by life-changing resolutions. As he advances to take a seat, Dana is finishing a glass of water and putting the little bottle of Tylenol back into the first drawer of her desk.

 

“I was kind of lying before. I don’t want to have sex with you in order to move on,” he says like ripping a band-aid off and she just looks at him for the better part of half a minute, opens the first drawer again and puts the bottle of Tylenol back on the table.

 

“Look, Casey—”

 

“I am not a sex offender!”

 

It is entirely possible that he is leading this conversation all wrong, but his heart beats too fast, his head hurts too much and he is not that sure he’s actually breathing? Is his brain even being oxygenated? Cause that would actually explain some things.

 

“Look, Casey, why don’t we just… forget the last forty eight hours and just go on from there.”

 

It’s like being back in college all over again. It’s like half-a-year ago all over again.

 

“No.” He is vaguely conscious that he is shaking the foundations of their relationship with that very monosyllable.

 

“No?” Dana’s voice sounds high pitched and a little nervous.

 

“We’ve done that before and it hasn’t really worked for either of us.”

 

Dana looks him in the eye for several seconds. It should be unnerving, but somehow it never is when Dana does it.

 

“What do you want from me, Casey?” she sounds tired and almost afraid, which he can’t quite comprehend. Over the long story of their relationship, she has always been the one calling the shots, proposing for them to forget about the latest kiss, insisting on him dating other women.

 

“I want to be with you. I wanted to be with you back in college and I’ve wanted to be with you many more times over the years and if you don’t want it you are going to have to say it because I’m done with this implicit, passive-aggressive rejection.” He takes some air and extends his arms over the desk to grasp her hands. “This time you are going to have to explicitly reject me, only please, please, don’t reject me.”

 

There is a single tear rolling down her cheek now and Casey is going to die of asphyxiation and probably embarrassment if she doesn’t say anything soon.

 

“You are the most important person in my life,” she says and Casey starts to freak out because that sounds exactly like the first act of a play on rejection. “I _can’t_ lose you.”

 

“You are not going to lose me. We have been awkward, and mad at each other. We have been through really bad times and we are still right here. You are not going to lose me Dana, no matter what.”

 

She squeezes his hands and lowers her head to hide her weeping eyes. Casey doesn’t really know what that means but there is a sinking feeling at the bottom of his stomach that threatens to drown him completely.

 

“Dana, I—”

 

“Shut up.”

 

She leans forward and liberates her hands from his to grab his face, one hand slowly tangling in his hair toward his nape while she kisses him, hard and deep, with an intensity that Casey doesn’t remember feeling ever before.

 

**DANA**

 

Anthony’s is not half as crowded tonight as it was the night before. Too many headaches and too few hours of sleep making most of their co-workers of Sports Night head straight home right after finishing the emission.

 

She should be heading home too, but she is too giddy to sleep. Casey takes her hand and leads her to a booth near the far corner of the bar and orders a couple of beers for both of them. They are exhausted and barely functional but somehow full of possibilities.

 

“So…” Natalie appears out of nowhere as she usually does, and she loves the girl, she really does, but she takes the seat at her side as Jeremy seats beside Casey and she kinds of want to rip her head off. She is only this violent when she is sleep deprived. “Are you two a thing?”

 

Casey, being good, old Casey smiles and instead of ripping anybody’s head off just throws the question back. “Are you two?” Dana guesses that’s also a valid reaction.

 

Jeremy and Natalie make doe eyes at each other for a moment and Dana realizes far too late that once again they are blocking Casey’s and her way out of the booth.

 

Great.

 

“Well, that’s not a simple question, Casey,” says Natalie with a mischievous smile, “Let’s just say that I love Jeremy and I’m not wearing a crucial item of my outfit.”

 

Casey’s face of freaking out could only be described as epic.

 

“What is happening here?” Casey asks with just a hint of terror in his voice.

 

“Socks,” says Dana kind of deadpanned.

 

“I’m not wearing any socks right now,” confirms Natalie in a seductive voice.

 

“Apparently Jeremy has a thing for socks or lack of them.” Dana explains to Casey and takes a long sip of her beer. “I’m not sure. I try not to keep up.”

 

“What do you want to do about my lack of socks, Jeremy?”

 

Natalie continues to shamelessly flirt with Jeremy and Casey’s face reflect his disbelief at the reality of it all.

 

“What’s happening?!” he asks her eying suspiciously the other couple.

 

“Welcome to my life.”

 

Casey takes his beer and stands up interrupting whatever outrageous proposition Natalie was about to make and just demands that his most basic rights as human being would be heard.

 

“Let us go. Let us go. Let us go!”

 

It would be really comical for her if it wasn't because she has been in that exactly same situation one too many times before. She grabs her own beer and follows him out of the booth and as they walk toward Dan and Rebecca’s table, Casey’s hand falls by default at the small of her back. It is a nicer sensation than she could have anticipated.

 

“Please, tell me you both have a healthy relationship with socks,” says Casey as soon as they reach Dan and his date.

 

“What?” asks Rebecca sounding more curious than questioning of Casey’s sanity and Dan simply looks at her like there is nothing outstandingly wrong in that sentence.

 

“It’s a long and disturbing story.”

 

She smiles at Casey and Casey smiles back at her, and when she checks, Dan is smiling at both of them. It’s the first time since she reached something resembling adulthood that she can feel it, that she can feel _this_. Her quirks and little neurosis are not fading away—not even shrinking—but merely falling into place with the quirks and neurosis of these other people around her.

 

Her chosen family.

 

“To Dana!” claims Dan raising his glass after some chatter and a couple of rounds, “the best producer a sports tv show could have. I left the Laker girls for you.”

 

Amid the agreements and all embarrassment aside, there’s other feeling deep inside herself that is hard to ignore.

  
Something new is finally starting up, igniting, being lit up.

**Author's Note:**

> Not my best work yet it was greatly improved by @dasku
> 
> You should thank her.


End file.
